Lord of the Isles (50 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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Two soldiers straightened, keeping their grip on Asera between them. Another soldier had his sword half-raised to threaten the fellow in the other chimney seat, but the traveler's
lifted cudgel made that a standoff for the moment.
“Callin!” Asera said to the officer. “What are you doing wearing Sandrakkan colors? Did the queen decide you were too slimy for even her to stomach?”
Callin laughed merrily. He swept off his helmet and bowed to the procurator.
“Mistress Asera,” he said, “I can't
tell
you how pleased I am that the king chose you for his agent and that I was here to greet you. I haven't forgotten your interference in the matter of the chief steward's wife, you see.”
Callin was a tall man with handsome features and shoulder-length hair as blond as Sharina's own. His eyes were blue; they glittered the way a snake's do. He swept them around the room before returning to the man in the chimney alcove.
“Not him, master,” the innkeeper said hurriedly. “Master Eskal inspects the earl's properties in this district and to the west. I know him well.”
Callin nodded and gestured away the soldier fronting Eskal. He turned his attention to Sharina and Meder. The queen's agent was supple and shone with a lacquered perfection despite having ridden here through the rain.
Sharina sipped her mulled wine. She thought of the hatchet in her belt, thought of Nonnus still outside; and waited.
“Does the earl know that you're meddling in his domains?” Asera said to Callin's back. “What do you suppose he'll do to this inn and everyone in Gonalia when he learns they've been aiding you?”
Callin chuckled. He fingered the horsehead on his sleeve. “Oh, the earl and my mistress are very good friends, Asera,” he said. “I'm acting for both of them in this matter, and these men—”
He patted the cheek guard of the soldier beside him; the man looked as though he'd swallowed something unpleasant.
“—are the earl's own troops, right enough. Aren't you, boys?”
The soldiers grunted. Sharina had seen poisonous snakes
she liked better than she did Callin; but as did those snakes, the queen's agent had a glittering beauty.
He looked at Meder and all the humor left his face. “Yes,” Callin said, “I know you too, don't I, Meder bor Mederman?”
He took the ivory athame from the wizard's sash, looked at it with distaste, and tossed it accurately into the center of the fire with only a glance to judge distance and angle. He smiled again.
“Master Meder,” he said. “My directions from the queen are to take all of you alive if possible. You're believed to have valuable information. If you make a sound that I imagine could be charm or curse, however, I'll have your tongue torn out.”
Callin smiled more broadly. “No, I misspoke,” he said. “I'll tear your tongue out myself.”
The soldier still held Meder against the wall. Callin chucked the wizard under the chin with two fingers.
“Wizards are quite all right in their proper place,” he said pleasantly to the room at large. “There was doubtless wizardry behind the decision to send me to this godforsaken place to await the king's agent. But if some little toad of a wizard tries to get in my way, well, he won't like the place I think proper to put him in.”
Callin stood in front of Sharina and put his hands on his waist. “And just who have we here, mistress?” he said.
The mug was empty. Sharina set it on the bench beside her. “I'm Sharina os-Reise from Barca's Hamlet on Haft,” she said, looking up at the tall, smiling man. “Mistress Asera engaged me as her maid.”
“Oh, I think you're rather more than that, my dear,” Callin said. “More even than the prettiest little girl I've ever seen on Sandrakkan, I rather think.”
He drew the hand axe from the loops of her shoulder belt and looked at it critically. There was rust on the blade because she hadn't wiped it down since coming out of the rain and
spray, but the steel was honed to a working edge without nicks or dull spots.
“We were shipwrecked,” Sharina said simply.
Callin's smile wavered into one of real appraisal. “Well, we'll see to it that you're not shipwrecked again,” he said. He looked around and flipped the hand axe into the molding above the bar. The edge banged a finger's breadth deep in the wood. The innkeeper's wife bleated in fear, then stuffed the hem of her apron in her mouth with both hands.
“Let's go,” Callin said to his men in a hard voice. “I'll take care of Mistress Sharina here. Two of you tie the others' hands to the tail of your horses.”
He grinned at the procurator. “If I'm feeling kindly, Asera my dear, I'll walk you back to the castle. But I warn you, my mount has a very comfortable trot.”
Callin started to offer his arm to Sharina. The outside door opened. Soldiers jerked around. Callin drew his sword so swiftly that the blade sang against the bronze lips of his scabbard. The layered steel shimmered in a pattern like the ripples of a running stream.
Nonnus walked into the common room. He carried his javelin point-forward over his left shoulder with his bindle hanging behind him.
A soldier tried to grab him by the throat. Nonnus kicked the man in the groin and shoved him gasping aside. Nobody else moved for a moment.
“And who are you, my man?” Callin asked. Sharina picked up the mug. It was heavy enough to be useful … .
“I'm Nonnus son of Bran, son of Pewle,” the hermit said in a voice from deep in his throat. “And who are
you,
buddy, besides the man who's going to be looking at his guts on the floor if he doesn't point that sword someplace else?”
“No!” Callin said to one of his soldiers. Sharina hadn't seen the man tense to move, but Nonnus nodded to the officer with a wolfish grin.
“What are you doing here, Master Nonnus?” Callin asked.
He didn't move his sword, but the situation no longer teetered quite on the edge of a bloody abyss.
“I'm looking for Waley the Merchant,” Nonnus said. He looked around the common room with cold, angry eyes whose expression didn't change wherever they lighted. “Any of you lot know where he lives?”
Callin raised an eyebrow to the innkeeper. “Waley's been dead these ten years past,” the innkeeper said in a nervous voice. “His stepson Arduk handles what sealskin business comes through here nowadays. He's the ostler, three doors down on this side of the street.”
“Right,” Nonnus said, nodding. “I'll leave you lot to your fun, then.”
He looked at Callin. Callin relaxed minutely and gave Nonnus a curt nod.
The hermit slammed the door shut behind him. Callin sheathed his sword, and Sharina put down the mug.
“Let's go,” Callin repeated, his face still showing the strain of the past few moments. Whatever else the young courtier had done, he'd met Pewlemen before.
“Mistress—” He extended his arm to Sharina. “—you'll ride on my saddle ahead of me. I regret I didn't think to bring an extra horse for you.”
Sharina ignored the arm as she stood and walked to the door. Every sight and sound was crystalline, and she moved as though crystal knives surrounded her.
T
he captain fanned himself with his cap, the most wind anybody on the open-decked trading yawl had felt all day. He spat over the stern rail, a recognized custom for
summoning a breeze. His lips and those of his four crewmen were stiff with puckering to spit, all for nothing.
“If we don't get a breeze come morning,” the captain said, “it's out with the sweeps. There's no help for it.”
“It's mighty hot,” the wizened mate said, looking toward the northern horizon. Erdin was there, a good day's sail distant. An eternity distant if they didn't get a wind.
The yawl was loaded with oranges from the island of Shengy in the southern arc. Citrus fruit brought a good price in Erdin. The captain had decided to risk being becalmed in the center of the Inner Sea rather than take the slow but safe voyage around the western periphery—Shengy, Cordin, Haft, and finally Sandrakkan across the long passage. They'd had a steady south wind for the whole trip—until now, when they should have been making the final run for port.
The captain tried to spit again. His mouth was too dry. The three ordinary sailors watched him glumly. “Tomorrow, the sweeps,” he croaked. “Unless there's a wind.”
The mate stood, then scrambled like the monkey he resembled to the top of the short, forward-slanting mast. He wrapped his legs around the pole and stared north, shading his eyes with his paired hands. “On the horizon!” he called. “There's something moving.”
The captain hopped onto the rail and walked along it until he could see past the limp triangle of the lateen sail. There was something moving.
“It's a man on a raft,” the mate said. “Sister swallow me down but it looks to be a man on a raft!”
“How's he moving, then?” asked the helmsman, standing also. The yawl rocked gently as her crew's weight shifted.
The thing, whatever it was, disappeared; either over the northern horizon or under the oil-smooth surface of the sea. The yawl was alone again except for the pair of gulls circling near the zenith of the sky.
“No,” said the captain. He shivered as he stepped down from the rail. “It was a whale that spouted. That's what looked like a man.”
The mate looked at him, then lowered himself to the deck again in three long arm-over-arm snatches at the mainstay. He said nothing.
“I feel a wind,” the captain said, as much a prayer as an announcement to his crew. He turned his head slightly; the long hairs growing from the upper curve of his ear tingled.
“I feel a wind!” he repeated, this time with pleased assurance. “On the starboard quarter. Get the mast around and we'll be in Erdin by midday!”
He grabbed one of the lines himself, glad not only for the wind but because it let him forget what he thought he'd seen. The captain's eyes were better than those of any other man he knew, but the distance had been too great for any certainty.
The object had looked very like a plump man in a burial sheet, seated on a simple raft with nothing else aboard it. A blue haze surrounded the thing; and it moved. There could be no question but that it moved.
No question either that the captain hoped he'd never see the thing again.
G
arric had never seen any place as flat as Erdin. The sea on a calm day had more hills than did this city, where the natural elevation changed less than three feet in a block.
Even the buildings were limited to two or three stories—a contrast from Carcosa, where the tenements rose five or even six rickety levels above the ground. Garric supposed Erdin's soil wasn't firm enough to support the weight of tall buildings.
Tenoctris looked around with interest as she, Garric, and Liane followed the two-man handcart along the broad brick
street. Erdin was a growing city, not a backwater. In Carcosa there was more past than present and little hope for a future.
“In my day …” Tenoctris said. She smiled at the contrast between the millennium she meant by the words and the decades that most old women would be indicating. “In my day the Earl of Sandrakkan didn't really rule much more than bowshot from his castle on the eastern tip of the island. More of a bandit chief than a major ruler. And I never heard of Erdin.”
“Stancon the Fourth founded the city in place of the old port of Zabir ten miles up the coast,” Liane said primly. In one sense all nobles in the Isles were of a single class, no matter where they were born, but a girl from Sandrakkan would have heard more than her share of slights directed at her homeland in school on Ornifal. “That was a full three hundred years ago.”
Garric—Garric's mind, not Garric's self—remembered a swampy bottom extending to either side of the River Erd, brown with sediment brought halfway across the island. The only similarity between that landscape and the solid, bustling city of Erdin was that both were flat.
“Did, ah, Stancon put the city here because it was easier to defend a marsh?” Garric asked. He looked at Liane, uncertain of how much of the question that popped into his mind would have been there without his dream-guest, Carus.
Liane bridled, then broke into a laugh of embarrassment. “Yes he did,” she said. “Pirates from Ornifal were raiding the south coast every spring. He built a new city with no landing places nearby except for on the river, and that he could close with a chain. I shouldn't be defensive, I know.”
“All I could really say about the earl of my day,” Tenoctris said, “is that he didn't have a library good enough to draw me to his castle. Yole
did
have a fine library and it's been under the sea the past thousand years. On the evidence, the Earl of Sandrakkan's choice was the wiser one.”
The two laborers plodded on, one pulling and the other pushing the handcart with Benlo's body. Garric had sealed
the lid of the burial jar back in place with hot pitch. The crack was above the jar's ears so they could still be used to handle the weight. Traffic was thick even now that they'd left the commercial district around the harbor. Apartment blocks had given way to single-family dwellings. They were built row-house fashion, but each had its walled pool or garden between the house and the street.
It amazed Garric to see heavy wagons drawn by only a pair of horses or mules. Erdin was flat, and the hard paving meant that wheels didn't sink into the road. Two horses could haul loads that would require six or eight oxen back home.
They'd crossed three canals on their way east from the harbor. Flat-bottomed barges plied the black water, drawn by lines of boatmen singing dismal songs to synchronize their pace. The barges were bigger than any ship to land in Barca's Hamlet before the trireme's arrival.
“My father never cared what people thought of Erdin or Sandrakkan,” Liane said in explanation; almost in apology. “I don't know why I do.”
“Benlo thought of himself as a citizen of the whole Isles?” Garric asked. It was his question, not that of King Carus, but it wouldn't have occurred to him except for his dream visits with the last ruler of the united Isles. It was all right to come from Barca's Hamlet, from Haft, from anywhere, and to be proud of your home; but if that made you want to knock in the head of anybody from the next borough or next hamlet—
That was wrong. That led to kings who ruled with a sword in their hands, and who turned to that sword first because so often they'd found there was no other answer.
Liane looked at Garric in mild surprise. He realized that some of his questions weren't those of a Haft peasant, even a very well read Haft peasant. Garric or-Reise wasn't simply a Haft peasant anymore, though he was that too. He'd always be a peasant
also.
“No,” she said, “it wasn't that. My father didn't think of himself as a part of anything. He traveled everywhere in the Isles and I suspect beyond, but it didn't matter any more to
him than the sea matters to a fish. He was
in
the world, not of it.”
Her eyes focused on the burial jar ahead of her. The terra-cotta was waxed on the outside so that it wouldn't absorb rainwater and shatter at the first hard freeze, a coarse piece of workmanship even before Garric repaired it with a black smear of tar.
Liane didn't see the jar or even the man who'd died. Her eyes were on the father who sang of far places when she was a child. A tear dribbled from the corner of her eye; she blotted it without embarrassment.
“I don't think anything ever touched him except my mother,” she said. “He was always good to me, Garric, but I think that was because he saw Mother through me.”
Garric cleared his throat. He couldn't think of anything to say.
The street widened still further; the right and left lanes were divided by a line of dwarf cypresses interspersed with round ornamental ponds. Garric tried to imagine the cost of building and maintaining facilities like these. For the first time he was gaining an appreciation for the world of wealth and power in which Liane had been raised.
“Even the public streets are luxurious,” he said aloud.
Tenoctris looked at him. “It took three centuries for this city to rise from the swamps,” she said. “If the darkness comes again, the swamps can return in three years.”
Garric squeezed the medallion beneath his tunic. He nodded.
A sedan chair passed at a quick pace. The trotting bearers wore thick-soled leather sandals and grunted “Ho!” when their right feet struck the pavement. The woman sitting upright under a shade of purple velvet was as perfect as an ivory statue of the Lady, but the image would have had more warmth.
The houses here were very fine. Each stood within its own grounds behind a wall or wrought-iron fence. Liane returned
to the present with a look of surprise and called, “Cartmen? Turn here—down this alley.”
The man pushing from the back of the cart looked over his shoulder. He and his fellow slowed but continued walking onward through the boulevard's intersection with an alley only twelve feet broad—still wider than most of the thoroughfares Garric had seen in modern Carcosa.
“No, miss,” the carter said. “The tradesman's entrance is on the other side. We've made deliveries here before.”
“We're not making a delivery,” Liane said with a flush of anger on her high cheekbones. “Turn down here if you expect to be paid.”
With a shrug of put-upon tolerance the men halted, then swapped ends and turned the handcart up the street they'd just passed. Apparently one always led and the other always followed.
“She'll see,” the man at the front said without looking around. Liane's expression could have chipped stone.
A high spiked fence surrounded the grounds, but through the bars Garric could see the house, whose brick walls were weathered to a rusty brown. The sash windows were narrow and glazed with small diamond panes, another sign that the house had been built in a previous century before glassmakers had learned to roll larger plates.
He looked at Liane. “Was this …” he asked, and nodded toward the house to complete the question.
“Yes,” she said without inflection. “This is where I was born and where I lived until my mother died.”
She turned and called to the carters, “Stop here.”
“This isn't—” one of the men said. “Say, this is a tomb! What is this we've got here?”
Until the man spoke in a tone of rising anger, Garric hadn't realized that the carters were unaware that they were carrying a corpse. The burial jars of the Carcosa district were as unfamiliar to Erdin citizens as they had been to Garric.
“It's the burden you've been hired to bring here,” Liane said, taking an intricate bronze key from a fold of her sash.
“And because you've brought it without superstitious mumbling, I'm going to double your pay as soon as you've placed it inside.”
The carters looked at one another. The one in the front shrugged. “Just as you say, miss,” he said respectfully.
Garric had assumed that all city people followed the same customs. That was as silly as assuming that everybody on Haft raised sheep. At least he hadn't embarrassed himself in public by saying something.
Somewhere out of time King Carus was laughing. There were worse false assumptions a man could make, and worse results than embarrassment.
The tomb was a low brick building at the back corner of the property, separated from the remainder of the tract by its own fence. Garric supposed bodies couldn't be buried in the ground where the water table was as high as here in Erdin. The ivy that grew on the fence and structure hadn't been trimmed in too long. Rootlets had dug out the mortar and loosened some of the bricks. There were no windows in the front half of the building and only one—small and round—in the rear.
Liane unlocked the gate in the outer fence. There was a paved court in front of the tomb and a stone bench beside the door. The rusty hinges fought her; Garric stepped to her side and pushed, forcing the gate open with a squeal.
Tenoctris was looking through a gap in the ivy toward the house. The overgrown fence almost completely hid the tomb from the main building. That was probably deliberate on the part of the new owners. How much did they know about the man who'd lived in the house before them?
Garric was ready to lend his strength in moving the tomb door as Liane inserted the same key into its lock, but these hinges were bronze and sheltered by the overhanging gable besides. The door swung outward easily for the girl. She stepped aside and said to the carters, “Place the jar as close as you can to the bier against the back wall, please.”
She touched the tie-strings of her purse as a reminder to
the men. They muscled the burial jar off the cart and carried it inside without complaint.
The coat of arms carved into the marble keystone of the door arch was a bunch of grapes above a slanting line—a
bend
, other memory whispered—and a human skull below. Liane followed Garric' eyes and said, “Our lands in the west of the island were famous for their wines. I don't know why my ancestor chose the skull.”
She laughed with a tinge of bitterness. “The lands still are famous for their wines, I suppose. They're just not ours. Nothing is ours but this tomb.”
The carters had placed the burial jar as directed. They left the tomb quickly, sneezing from the dust. Liane took a coin from her purse—silver, as she'd promised. With the men no longer blocking the narrow aisle, Garric was able for the first time to see the building's interior.
There were two sets of brick racks on either side of the tomb. Each could hold four oblong wooden caskets. Most of the places were filled; debris on the dimly lit floor indicated that still more caskets had rotted away with their contents in past years. Garric thought of the dust and held his breath.
There was a single, wider shelf against the back wall. Fivebranched candelabra stood at the head and foot of the bronze casket resting there. The candles had burned down to stalactites of wax so long ago that even the odor of their flames had vanished; the holders, though tarnished, were almost certainly silver.
“My mother,” Liane said simply. The cartwheels rumbled away as the men returned to their station near the harbor. “He'd want to be close to her. I wish …”
Her voice trailed off. In a wooden tone she resumed, “I wish that Mother hadn't died. I wish that my father had died with her. And sometimes I wish I'd never been born, Garric.”
He put his hand around the girl's shoulder and held her, keeping his face rigidly toward the back of the tomb while she sobbed. After a time she straightened and blew her nose.
Garric released her but continued to look at the building's interior.
“There aren't any windows here,” he said. “There's another room behind this one.”
“The groundskeeper's shed is built onto the other side of the tomb,” Liane said in a more-or-less normal voice. “It's quite separate.”
She cleared her throat and added, “Thank you, Garric. I think we can close up this building and leave now. I don't expect ever to return.”
Garric looked at her. She gestured toward the coffins. “Those aren't my mother and father,” she said. “It's a shame my father was never able to understand that. I might still have him if he'd seen that dust isn't a real person.”

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